Karl Jansky Biography

Karl Jansky was born in Norman, Oklahoma in 1905. He was named after physicist Karl Guthe whom his father worked under earlier on. This translated an interest in science and physics to Karl Jansky as his father taught Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Jansky became a part of Bell labs in 1928 after graduating from University of Wisconsin and started his master's degree after undergraduate but never obtained it. 1929 Jansky began building an antenna to receive radio signals; it rotated and scanned the sky in twenty minutes. Jansky discovered three types of static: weak static from distant thunder storms, stronger static from local thunder storms, and persistent static. The last signal was thought to have unknown origins but eventually Jansky found that it comes from the center of the Milky Way, from all of the stars. His discovery was rather lucky because he scanned the sky during an 11 year period of low sunspot activity, otherwise the sun's radiation would overwhelm that of the other stars. Jansky's publications about star noise, also named "Star Noise" garnered him his Masters degree in 1936. During WWII, he worked on direction finders to locate German submarines. Jansky is considered the first person to discover the static signals that come from outer space and influenced future astronomers to develop more things that have to do with radio astronomy. Such future astronomers consist of Grote Reber who confirmed and expanded Jansky's discovery, growing the field of radio astronomy. Karl Jansky died on Valentine's Day, 1950 due to kidney failure caused by Bright's Disease. Jansky has a unit of measurement named after him, called the jansky, which is for radio-wave emission strength. Bell Labs have a monument dedicated to Jansky in 1998 at the New Jersey lab which he conducted his study. There is also a crater on the Moon called Jansky, in honor of him.

APOD 4.8

Voyager's Neptune

Voyager 2 spacecraft made it's closest approach to Neptune on August 25, 1989. This is the only spacecraft that has made a successful visit to this jovial planet. This images shows the planet, the moon Triton, and a latent system of rings. The light being shown is because that is the side of the planet that is facing the Sun. The background starfield is composed of the stars that are in the constellation Camelopardalis.

APOD 4.7

Valles Marineris: The Grand Canyon of Mars

The largest canyon in the solar system creates a wide crevice across Mars. The valley, Valles Marineris, extends over 3,000 km long, 600 km across, and 8 km deep. The origin of the valley is unknown, but a popular hypothesis claims that it started as a crack from billions of years ago as the planet cooled. Many geologic processes have been identified in the canyon.

APOD 4.6

Brisbane Sunset Moonset

The Sun and the New Moon set together over the skies of Queensland, Australia on April 29. This composite of pictures is a stack of images taken 5 minutes apart with a solar filter and telescope lens. It follows the solar eclipse in progress, approaching a western horizon where rays from the bank join the setting moon. Only a isolated part of Antarctica was able to see the eclipse in its annular phase, the entire dark ring surrounded by a ring of light. This is a really interesting and rare image that I've never seen anything like before.

Karl Jansky Sources

http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_jansky.shtml

http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/karl-jansky-the-father-of-radio-astronomy.html

http://www.nndb.com/people/055/000204440/

http://cosmology.carnegiescience.edu/timeline/1964/karl-janskys-radio-antenna

http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/education/tutorials/pioneers/jansky.html

APOD 4.5

Hubble's Messier 5

This is an image of Messier 5 (M5) which is a globular star cluster of about 100,000 stars or more. The region is about 165 light-years in diameter and the stars are bounded by gravity. M5 is about 25,000 light years away from us and it roams the halo of our galaxy. It's one of the oldest globular clusters and it has very old stars toward the dense core and gives off a reddish hue. This is a really awesome image and gives off cool colors.

Solar Stormwatch

I worked on some of the activities in the solar stormwatch section and learned how to spot solar storms.

April 15 Observation

I woke up at 3 AM to watch the lunar eclipse for an hour and it was very interesting to watch the moon turn reddish in color. I used the constellation app on my phone to find other constellations in the night sky. My dad and I took some interesting photos of the lunar eclipse.

APOD 4.4

Spica, Mars, and Eclipsed Moon

A red moon went through our night sky on April 15 immersed in Earth's shadow for over an hour. It was the year's first total lunar eclipse. In this image the moon is contrasting with the blue star Spica and it provides a really cool juxtaposition. Brighter than spica, Mars is near opposition and closest approach to Earth. This is a really cool and once in a lifetime image.

Hercules M13 Cluster

I adjusted the image by using the log then auto. I sharpened the image twice and then reduced the noise about 3 times.

Centaurus A

I adjusted the image by using log then auto. I sharpened the image, reduced the noise twice, then sharpened it again.

APOD 4.3

Mars Near Opposition

April 8-14 is when Mars is between opposition and closest approach looping through the constellation Virgo opposite the Sun in the night sky. This clear image was captured with a high speed digital camera and a 16 inch diameter telescope from Assis, Brazil. Mars' north polar cap is at the top left of the image and there are water vapor clouds condensing in the cold atmosphere above Mars' volcanos. Mars will be about 1/100th the angular size of the Moon. I've never seen as detailed an image of Mars before so this image is pretty cool.

Contributions to the Understanding of Our Galaxy

Galileo - Found that Milky Way Galaxy was full of stars and not just nebulae.
Immaneul Kant - Observed spiral nebula, believed that the Milky Way was the universe and the galaxy had a disc shape.
William Herschel - Provided many measurements to estimate distances and position in the Milky Way.
Henrietta Leavitt - Period and luminosity relation.
Harlow Shapley -Used a new telescope and the RR Lyrids and Cepheids to measure the distances to the globular clusters and that we were not near the center of the galaxy.
Heber Curtis - Believed that the universe had separate islands in the sky and wasn't one conformed group galaxy.
Edwin Hubble - Able to measure stars in other galaxies and show that there were many other things out there.

APOD 4.2

Along the Western Veil

This image is the of the western part of the Veil Nebula and is toward the Cygnus constellation in the Earth's sky. The Veil Nebula is a large supernova remnant. The light from the original supernova explosion reached Earth about 5,000 years ago. The glowing filaments in the image are like long ripples of separated red atomic hydrogen and blue-green oxygen gas. The Veil Nebula is also known as the Cygnus Loop; it spans the distance of about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon. Parts of the Western Veil that are brighter are recognized as separate nebulae, such as Pickering's Triangle (NGC 6979) and the Witch's Broom (NGC 6960). This image just has a really awesome color and is very aesthetically pleasing.

APOD 4.1

Stephan's Quintet Plus One

This image of Stephan's Quintet was formulated with data from the Hubble Legacy Archive and the Subaru Telescope. Only 4 of the 5 galaxies are locked in a "cosmic dance", the closest galaxies being 300 million light years away. They all have distorted loops and tails spawning out of their shape due to gravitational tides. Stephan's quintet is within the boundaries of the Pegasus constellation. NGC 7320C is the galaxy that is all the way to the left that is the outlier. This is an incredible image because it shows a distance of 500 million light years and understates how large these galaxies truly are.

Astronomy Night Observations

On March 1st I attended the Astronomy Night from 7-9pm and it was one of the clearest night skies I have observed in the past month. I used the Sky Map app to observe winter/spring time constellations such as Orion, Taurus, Auriga, Canis Major, and Gemini. I was able to observe the Pleiades and the Hyades star clusters. We used the telescopes to observe different types of stars and Jupiter, which was incredibly bright in the night sky.

Pulsars and Neutron Stars

A neutron star is an imploded core of a massive star that occurs from a supernova. It is one of the ways of a high mass star to end its stellar evolution cycle. The typical mass of a neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. Neutron stars occur once a star uses up all of its fuel and sheds its outer layer and then collapses on itself. A pulsar is a neutron star that emits beams of radiation that sweeps through Earth's line of sight. The pulses of high energy that we can see from Earth comes from the misalignment of the neutron star's rotation and magnetic axis.

Vela Pulsar

Neutron Star

APOD 3.8

7 March 2014

 

This is Venus and the Milky Way rising in the early morning hours of March 1st. This picture was taken on the skyline of the beach at Sea Isle City, New Jersey. Venus lies just beyond the inner boundary of the habitable zone. Earth orbits well within the habitable zone of the solar system. The watery reflection of light from Venus is seen along the beach. This is a nice, serene photo that is just very peaceful about Venus rising in the morning.

James H. Jeans Biography

Sir James Hopwood Jeans, born on September 11th 1877 and died on September 16th 1946, was an English physicist and mathematician who was the first person to propose that matter is continually formulated throughout the universe. He studied at many grammar schools throughout his childhood and Trinity College in Cambridge. He was elected as a Fellow of Trinity College in 1901 and taught at Cambridge. He moved on to teach at Princeton University in 1904 as a professor of applied mathematics but returned to Cambridge in 1910. He provided many positive contributions to physics and astronomy such as quantum theory, stellar evolution, and the theory of radiation. Sir Jeans proposed the idea that the planets condensed from material drawn out of the Sun by a hypothetical near-collision with a passing star; this idea is not accepted in the modern world. Jeans is one of the founders of cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe. Much of his work included investigations of star systems, dwarf stars, sources of stellar energy and the deconstruction of rapidly spinning bodies. He published many scientific works that launched his scientific reputation such as The Dynamical Theory of Gases (1904), Theoretical Mechanics (1906), and Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (1908). One of his major discoveries is the Jeans length, which is a critical radius of an interstellar cloud in space. He created an alternate to the equation called the Jeans instability which solves for the critical mass a cloud must attain before collapsing. Another law that he helped in creating is the Rayleigh--Jeans Law, which relates the energy density of blackbody radiation the an emission source's temperature. Jeans garnered multiple awards for his scientific achievements such as the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1919 and being a Member of the Order of Merit in 1939. Sir James Hopwood Jeans has had a lasting impact on the scientific realm with his publications in physics, astronomy, and applied mathematics.

APOD 3.7

February 27, 2014

Venus now appears as our planet's morning star above the horizon before dawn. The lunar crescent passed in front of Venus in West Africa during the sunrise. This image was captured right before the occultation began under the skies of Yunnan Province. This is easily visible to the naked eye in the Earth's sky. This looks very awesome because it looks as if the moon looks incredibly large in comparison to Venus and the Moon covers Venus in some parts of the Earth sky.